Ethnicity as Synthetic Action
Let us pause to reflect again on one of the central questions of this book: why does ethnicity still matter, and how can a focus on its ritualized nature add value to what sometimes appears to be a fully saturated sphere of scholarly discourse? The answer to this question requires a brief foray into an anthropological notion of “practice” broader than my own, as described above: that which came to the fore in the 1980s and early 1990s in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal work in outlining a “theory of practice” (1977, 1990). Appropriating Bourdieu’s well-known concept of habitus as a “system of durable, transposable dispositions” (Bourdieu 1977:72), G. Carter Bentley argued for a “practice theory of ethnicity” through which we might understand ethnicity as a “multi-dimensional habitus [in which] it is possible for an individual to possess several different situationally relevant but nonetheless emotionally authentic identities and to symbolize all of them in terms of shared descent” (1987:35). For Bentley, “the theory of practice provides an efficient means of explaining the conjunct of affect and instrumentality in the phenomenon of ethnicity” (28), but following Bourdieu, Bentley suggests that the dispositions of habitus are “not normally open to conscious apprehension” (27).
The promise of such action-oriented approaches to understanding ethnicity—summarized succinctly by Felicia Hughes-Freeland and Mary Crain’s call for anthropologists to “consider identity less as being, and more in terms of doing” (1998:15)—has been to some extent compromised by the Marxist-inflected legacy of Bourdieu’s emphasis on the unconscious nature of practice. This influence is also evident in work that treats ethnicity as a “fetish,” which conceals the true conditions of its production (van Beek 2000; Willford 2006). As ethnicity began to decline as a fashionable topic of anthropological inquiry by the late 1990s, work like Bentley’s, which sought to understand how ethnic subjectivity itself was produced in action, was eclipsed by work that foregrounded the discursive construction of ideas about ethnicity (Anderson 1991).
James Scott takes a different position toward the intentionality of ethnic actors in his framing of the problem of “ethno-genesis” in Southeast Asia, while at the same time returning to the insights of earlier scholars who sought to understand ethnicity-in-action long before the turn toward practice theory, notably Edmund Leach. Scott casts ethnic communities—particularly those he defines as “highland peoples”—as key players in shaping the states on whose margins they live. Scott focuses on a metalevel historical discussion of these dynamics, offering only brief but enticing insights into how ethnic consciousness is actually produced on the ground. “A person’s ethnic identity … would be the repertoire of possible performances and the contexts in which they are exhibited,” he writes, but “there is, of course, no reason at all to suppose one part of the repertoire is more authentic or ‘real’ than any other” (2009:254–55). This assertion hearkens back to Bentley’s (1987) description of a multidimensional habitus in which multiple authentic identities may coexist, while also according ethnic action a degree of consciousness that Bentley and others working within the confines of formal practice theory cannot. I seek to carry forward the promise of both these approaches by marrying an analysis of ethnicity-in-action with a focus on intentionality.
Enacting simultaneous, multiple subjective states that are all affectively real requires a substantial degree of self-consciousness and self-objectification on the part of actors who practice and perform ethnic identities. For many Thangmi, this consciousness emerges in the subjective space created by the repeated process of shifting frames between multiple nation-states as circular migrants. For Thangmi settled in one location or another, contact with Thangmi circular migrants and their worldviews can effect different but comparably intimate shifts in frame. The self-consciousness engendered through these regular reframings is evident in the manner in which individuals recognize the gap between practice and performance, and work to synthesize these fields of action into an identity that is both productive, in the affective sense of belonging, and constructive, in the political sense of rights (cf. Ortner 1996). An action-based approach to ethnicity enables us to see how a wide range of different intentions and motivations held by many individuals belonging to a putatively singular ethnic group can in fact work in concert to produce a multidimensional ethnic habitus, of which the recognition of intragroup difference is itself a key feature.
Framing Cross-Border Subjectivities
It is easy to reify the unit of the nation-state itself, as well as “other kinds of groups that spring up in the wake of or in resistance to the nation-state,” as primordial “individuals-writ-large … imagined to ‘possess’ cultural properties that define their personalities and legitimate their right to exist” (Handler 2011). Anthropologists have widely recognized the modern nation-state as the primary structure shaping processes of ethnicization. But does this assessment match with the subjective perceptions of those who experience ethnicization? Nation-states may certainly be viewed as “individuals-writ-large” by people who live firmly within the borders of one state or another and whose subjectivity is defined by such a nationalist ethos in a singular manner. However, the views of “border peoples,” whose subjectivities have long been defined by interactions with multiple states may be markedly different.1 In the Thangmi context, the long history of cross-border circular migration and the concomitant in-depth experience of multiple frameworks for defining national and ethnic identities lead to a different view. Nation-states are seen as flexible identity-framing devices, in relation to which individuals and collectivities produce meaningful cultural content in each context, rather than absolute identity-determining structures, which in themselves dictate that content.
This argument leads to an inversion of nationalist perspectives in which “the group is imagined as an individual” with a homogeneous identity (Handler 2011). Instead, in the cross-border Thangmi context, collective identity cannot exist without the manifold contributions of heterogeneous individuals, each of whom possesses complementary elements of the overall repertoire of ritualized action required to establish the existential presence of the group within multiple state frames. From the perspectives of those who belong to it, the group is not imagined as a coherent “individual” but is readily acknowledged as the product of disparate life experiences embodied by multiple individuals in as many locations. As Surbir, a long-term Darjeeling resident originally from Nepal put it, “We Thangmi are like the beads of a broken necklace that have been scattered all over the place. And now it’s time to find them and put them back together again.” Surbir’s statement shows that this sense of fragmentation is not necessarily the desired state of affairs, and many Thangmi activist agendas focus on synthesizing disparate Thangmi practices into a coherent whole. The Nepal Thami Samaj (NTS) Second National Convention Report, for instance, echoes Surbir’s metaphor with the assertion that the convention’s main objective was “to integrate the Thamis living in various places, … to make [our] demands and fundamental identity widespread, and to string together all the Thamis” (NTS 2005:4). Yet it is the self-consciousness of this process of mixture, the ongoing synthesis of disparate experiences, beliefs, and ideologies, all held together under the name “Thangmi,” as well as “Thami,” which defines collective identity at the most fundamental level.
Mahendra, a Thangmi artist well-known in Darjeeling, explained his views on the collective production of Thangminess with an analogy: “I am an artist; so many people who meet me who have never met a Thangmi before think that all Thangmi are artists. Actually, they should think instead, ‘If a Thangmi can be an artist, then there must also be Thangmi writers, cooks, football players, dancers, and everything else.’ Each Thangmi should be Thangmi in his own way.” Viewing ethnicity as a collective project, to which individuals may make varying contributions in a laterally differentiated manner rather than as a vertically homogenous “individual” that requires group members to articulate belonging in more or less similar ways, diminishes the need to wrestle divergent experiences into neat arguments about group solidarity or singular authenticity. The quality of “we-feeling,” which, for instance, the Nepal Foundation for the Development of Indigenous Nationalities (NFDIN) Act (NFDIN 2003:7) lists as one of the defining criteria for membership as an Indigenous People’s Organization (IPO), may actually be produced through the interactions and communication among members of individual groups, across boundaries of class, gender,